Turbine specifically recommends AGAINST running the game as administrator. Apparently it will result in an endless loop while launching the game; their explanation is that they correctly coded it to support UAC and that running as admin is both unnecessary and harmful.

It's fairly apparent from a perusal of the tech support forums that Vista installation woes, involving either .NET issues or lockups during the launcher, are far from unique. Many people are reporting similar issues and many are failing to get solutions. Meanwhile after playing with Vista for a few hours, a Win XP/64 installation worked on the first try with no tinkering.

Maybe Vista works great on certain hardware, or fine for people with above-average technical expertise. But to think that Vista is ready for prime-time for the average gamer who simply wants to run a publisher's installer and not have to do any tinkering, it just isn't there yet...Blame who you want--the PC manufacturers, the driver programmers, the game publishers, whoever: the reality is that lots of people are running into problems and it simply isn't ready for the everyday gamer yet, and until the industry as a whole adjusts to Vista it probably won't be.

WoW runs fine as does every other game that I've tried. All of which required no more technical expertise then to right click the launcher as click "run as admin".

I think it is valid to share with other users the difficulties that you are experiencing. I think it is also valid to share successes that you've had.
Clearly, we've had different experiences trying to use Vista. I think each person can decide for themselves what they should do, but it would be unfair to represent on the negative experiences.

Also, quite frankly, I am kind of done with the "MS is the debil" speak. I know its "cool" to hack on them, but its getting stupid already. I mean talk about being damned if you do and damned if you don't. I just read a pretty nasty attack on them because they put out a new version of their runtime? When did updating software with new features become a bad thing?

Seriously, I am not looking for a fight, but can we keep some perspective?

BTW, WoW does get flaked out by certain routers in certain situations, but this is not an OS problem.

It's not really a question of the evil or lack thereof in Microsoft. For the record, I don't think they're evil and I think they do a lot of great stuff. Vista has some really fantastic innovations in it--the integration of 3D within the desktop presentation system, and the new capabilities within DX10 are both excellent features which are ultimately benefit gaming. But right now it's simply a pragmatic question of whether Vista is ready for the average gamer. For most people, it's probably worth waiting until more of the problems are hammered out.

MS made a conscious, and publicized, decision to focus on the business segment of users for Vista because of delays in delivery and because they had contractual obligations to fulfill (and that's still where they derive most of their revenue) - so it's not a surprise your average home user and your average gamer are going to have fits with Vista. That's why I state for those rushing for Vista to wait or to dual-boot it.
In a correctly setup business environment, Vista should work fine. Outside of that, you're in for some heartburn.
I'm sorry, even with DX-10 and 64bit in the picture, there's still not enough justification for me to deal with heartburn of a first-adopter upgrade.
I've got enough angina directing a 2.0 to 3.0 framework upgrade to our enterprise foundation & framework library Legacy decisions ftw!

.NET 2.0 is backward compatible. The only reason that you would need .NET 1.1 to run an assembly is that it was specifically targeted to that version of .NET. Most application don't do this, but it was a legal option. Again, this is analogous to different versions of a Java VM.

.NET 2.0 added some very exciting features to .NET such as generics and anonymous delegates. These additions have allowed developers to build .NET applications that have performance equal to C/C++ applications.

If you consisider that it took 5 significant revisions of Java to get to a similiar level of efficiency, .NET did it in 3.